Finding My Place
From Tenure-Track Faculty to At-Home Wife and Part-Time Piano Teacher:
My Musical Struggle with Chronic Illness
January 2012
In
the late 1990s, as an impressionable and eager graduate student, I was
encouraged by my piano pedagogy professor to attend MTNA national conferences,
NCKP conferences, and additional local and state conferences as often as I
could. These experiences truly broadened my perspective as a young teacher and
changed the way I approached my future career as a music professor. After
attending a few conferences, my professor and I presented a session at a state
conference, and I admit I was absolutely hooked from that point forward and
wanted to experience the excitement of sharing knowledge again. Together we prepared
and presented a research poster session at the next year’s MTNA conference,
then as a doctoral student and young faculty member, I presented more poster
sessions on my own. My future goals immediately began to form and included the
desire to communicate more research via workshops, poster sessions, and
articles at local, state, and national venues, and become a strong and
contributing leader within the national piano pedagogy community. This was my
professional goal and the place I desired and aspired to be.
Fast-forward
a few years to 2007. As a young full time faculty member, I attended the MTNA
National Conference in Toronto and continued learning, forming new perspectives
towards my own teaching, and assembling ideas into prospective sessions and
articles. I was excited to return home and begin focusing my attention on these
new projects. However, during the first part of my plane ride, high above the
snowy landscape of the Rocky Mountains, I was stricken with terrible pains
radiating throughout my body. I had no idea what was happening to me because nothing
like this had ever occurred before. I thought to myself, “If I could just get
home and lie down, everything will be okay.” I didn’t know it at the time, but
that moment as the plane touched down in Denver was the last moment I would
think of myself, my career, and my life in the same way.
Throughout the coming months, I continued to experience more severe pain
and brain fog (which is exactly what it sounds like), and I became more and
more fatigued, irritable, anxious, and depressed. Then one day in September
2008 it happened. I awoke one morning and for a moment thought I was paralyzed. Read More...
As a brief aside to the last post, Survey: Your Top 5 Elementary Piano Solos of All Time, I should have mentioned that I am collecting this information as a precursor to a fun project that I am working on, which will culminate with some giveaways of that project!
